A quick adventure game, featuring a dead Alice, and a twisted wonderland. Not much to do, only a couple of riddles and a few rooms to explore, but it has nice aesthetics and gives an interesting view on the classic story. The developers say that there will be more… Oh, did I mention it’s free?
Click on the image to play
We would all like to use an interface like the one in minority report wouldn’t we? Waving our hands around and opening files, browsing through pictures and doing all sorts of “Tom Cruise stuff”. Maube, just maybe that time isn’t that far…
Some time ago, I came across a youtube video, showing the features of a desktop alternative, called Bump Top Desktop.
Nice isn’t it? Yeah, I know… Most of you will think it’s probably eye-candy and nothing more, but I beg to differ. I downloaded the free version, installed it on two PCs (home and work) and worked with it for several days. What the developers tried to achieve, was a more natural way of working with your computer desktop, just like you are used to working with a real desk. Having piles of papers, sorting out your more important documents on a different pile, sticking post-its all over the place or having picture frames with nice photos to make your work more tolerable.
At first I was excited about this new toy. So excited, I was ready to order the professional version, so I could have all the additional features. I must say this is a very very good program. Carefully designed, with only a few bugs, I expect to be corrected soon and very user-friendly. Today, I decided to uninstall it though. It was not the bugs.
I just felt this was not for me. I mean, its for people who actually work on their desktops. I keep all my files elsewhere, organized (kind of) in folders, and I try to keep my desktop free from large files – we all know that having large files on your primary partition slows down your pc, right?
I recommend a download though. Try it out. See if it makes your work easier and if so, buy it. ^^
Everybody tells you about the importance of keeping a back up (hey, even Jesus saves!!!) , with a ton of suggestions and practices, ranging from simply using a USB drive for your most important documents and files to using special software to more complex solutions. The thing is however, that when you own more than one PC you would prefer an easy, almost automated back up solution, right?
This is exactly what a friend thought, a friend who is crazy enough to own and operate six different boxes (without counting his two laptops), and after some internet research, he bought another machine and a copy of Windows Home Server and called me to set it up, some months ago.
Yesterday, he called me to tell me that one of his machines (a two year old Dell) crashed and he was waiting for a replacement HDD and asked me if I could stop by to help him set it up again. Having only used Norton Ghost (with a 98% success rate mind you) I thought it would take half an hour tops, but that was not the case at all… I don’t want to tire you with boring ranting, so I will describe the procedure that worked. Note here, that the WHS manual says nothing of value (except “Follow on screen instructions” 
) – read my verdict at the end of this post.
Before you read any further, I am talking about a complete restore. If you just want to bring back the porn you accidentally deleted, look elsewhere 
Step 1: Boot the machine you want to restore with the WHS restore cd. Microsoft claims that in 90% of home networks it will get in touch with Home Server and prompt you to start restoring your PC. What Microsoft forgot to tell us, is the fact that if your machines do not use DHCP, but have fixed IPs instead you belong to the 10%, so you’re not able to communicate with the server. Just go over to the server box and change the IP setting to DHCP. Everything else on your network will lose the server, but the machine you want to restore will find it… I did not try it my self, but someone said that he just connected the two machines with an ethernet cable. Crazy? Yes! Worked? Yes!
Step 2: You will be presented with a list of backups and after you chose which one you want to restore, the procedure will start. In my case the machine had a single HDD with a single partition, so things were rather simple. If you have a different set-up, you might want to be careful what you restore where, since all data in the destination disk will be lost.
Step 3 : I wish you don’t have to read this step, because in theory, everything worked out as supposed and you only have to press “Finish” to reboot into your newly restored machine. Before you reboot, take some time to review boot.ini. There is a button there, that will open a notepad with your OLD boot.ini. Now it is a good time to stop for a while and start thinking about the past. No, don’t laugh, I am dead serious. Think what you are trying to restore. In my case, as I said, it was a Dell box. Dell boxes, usually mean that apart from windows partition there is another, smaller and hidden partition that you use to restore your PC to factory settings. Does that ring a bell? HP does that too, Fujitsu Siemens does that too. If you are trying to restore after an HDD crash, chances are that this little partition will not exist in your new HDD take a look at the following boot.ini :
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Window XP Professional” /noexecute=optout /fastdetect
Do you see the (2)’s? It means that your old windows installation was on partition number 2, which of course no longer exists, so you cannot boot. You have to change those (2)’s into (1)’s and you will be fine. Really, this is the only thing you have to do… This little thing that Microsoft could have told us about, but did not…
There are many ways to do that. If you are lucky enough and have a newer build of WHS, you can edit it in notepad (when you press Review/Check boot.ini at the end of the restore) and save it and be done with it. If not, when you try to save, you will be informed that boot.ini is a read only file and you will have to save your changes under a different file name. So, do exactly that. You can then use something to access your disk, delete the old boot.ini and rename the file you just saved into boot.ini. What you use depends on your personal taste and resources. I only had a windows XP cd, so I booted with that, pressed R to go into recovery console and worked from there. You can also use a Linux live cd, one of those special boot disks (like Hiren’s), anything that will offer you access to your HDD.
I spent many hours trying to figure out those things I wrote above. See, when you restore and fail, the first thing that comes on your mind is the case you did something wrong, missed a step, chose the wrong option, so you try it again. That means time wasted… No matter how convenient I find the possibility to manage all your backups centrally, store files (WHS is more than a backup solution) and do all those neat little things, but for fuck’s sake, how do you expect an average user to come up with all those ideas and manage to do the simplest thing? Why on Earth don’t you provide all this info in the damn manual? You want me to propose your product to my clients? Seriously??
In my line of work, it is very common for me to have to answer all kinds of computer related questions, from what is the best lcd monitor one can buy to how can one download porn to how can one spy on his wife. I usually spit out something extremely generalized (and somewhat in-comprehensive), hoping to be left alone, not because I don’t want to share whatever knowledge I may have with others, but because I have come to realize that most people (especially colleagues) do not ask you to learn from you, they do so in hope that you will say “sure, I will fix it for you”. To this day, cases that someone really wanted to learn something from me, needed a little push so he/she could take it from there, are rare.
One question that is really often, is how can one “protect” his/her kids from the dangers of the internet. Check the following semi-real dialogue:
- My 10 year old son spends way too much time on the internet. What should I do?
- What do you mean? You’re feeling alone and want him to keep you company instead?
- Don’t be silly, I am worried that he will watch porn* (or start worshiping satan, or meet pedophiles, or buy drugs, or…)
- Well, yeah, there is the possibility.
- So? What do I do?
- Well, you could… [series of suggestions]
- What? All that? It is a LOT of work! Isn’t there a program or something for this kind of thing? A friend of mine says there is!
- There are such programs, but they require you to… [long explanation about how net-filters work]
- Crap! I thought I only had to throw it in and be done!
- Apparently, this is not the first time you thought that all you had to do is throw it in…
- What?
- Never-mind…
Apart from the obvious, the above conversation shows one other thing: Parents do not know what internet is and most importantly how can they take control of it. You could always pull the plug (just like you do with TV) but you still don’t know what goes on in that little box your kid spends so much time with. Thankfully I was browsing Geeks Are Sexy, and came across this:
Problem solved! You only have to follow the instructions in the video and you will be able to spy on your children, control their digital lives, threaten their friends and a bunch of other interesting things!
I have to apologize to all of you who thought that they would read something serious, or even a ranting and were “tricked” into watching a humorous video, but the truth is that I do not have the patience to deal with this matter more seriously than this. See, being a parent, means above all else, being responsible. Yes, internet might seem scary, unknown or simply too much work, but it is your kid we’re talking about. Invest some time…
I am not sure how many of you have heard about the wildfires in Greece, over the last few days, but it’s quite serious. While having a conversation, I was asked whether I am sad about it or not. I answered no…
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t care about the environment or that I would be happy if every inch of land was covered in cement. No, not at all. I just believe that caring about the environment, is actually caring about ourselves. Who are we trying to fool here? This planet does not need us! Even if we burn every forest, pollute every ocean and river, build skyscrapers all over the fucking place, we are going to end up with a planet we cannot live in. After time, nature will find her way back to where she wants and we will be like the dinosaurs, extinct.
Besides, these fires, are clearly the work of man, whether by accident or on purpose, it makes no difference. I refuse to believe that other countries have a magical way of preventing fires, while we are victims to all those who want to claim the forest for themselves. If you watch the news here, they are talking all the time about “them”, about those who want to build luxurious villas once the forest has cleared. The truth is however, a little bit different. I am old enough to remember how the mountain near where I live used to be, full of trees, and how it is now, full of houses. Houses that belong to middle class men and women, not multi-millionaires with huge houses…
We only try to hide the truth under the rag: There’s not enough room in Athens, so we will make room….
Remember when you wanted to make an archives page for your blog, but you always put it off for another time because adding 600 or so entries – with their links – is more than hard boring work? You don’t have to postpone it anymore! WordPress added a very nice little feature:
Make a new page and in the page body write {archives} (replace {} with [])
It will look something like this and it will save you a lot of trouble!
Until very recently, my eee900 was running on Suse Linux. I was more than happy with it, I liked the look and feel of it, I liked the fact that it was waaaay faster than windows and generally I thought we two were going to stick together for a long time. I did not know of one little detail though:
Vpn connection. I needed to be able to connect to my workplace through PPTP, since we are using windows machines there, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t make it work. Network manager, had support for vpn, but not pptp tunneling, so I resorted to Google and spent a whole day trying all kinds of remedies to no avail. My colleague, the one who talked me into installing Suse in the first place, had pptp up and running on his own machine and that only frustrated me more. It only meant that there was a way to make it work, I just hadn’t found it yet. When I asked him how he had done it, he said he could not remember (of course) but he could use Norton Ghost to bring his own image onto my machine. I agreed and gave him my eee, because I thought that having vpn was better than having to re-fine-tune suse. Due to a *slight* mistake on his side, I ended up booting in Windows home again (he had used the wrong image to restore on my eee), which solved me one problem (I now had vpn), but created a whole lot more (speed, hiccups, poor performance) .
The dilemma: Keep windows and try to speed them up, or re-install suse?
The windows user in me was screaming for the first option and I quickly found my self browsing through this thread and installing nLite. For the record, I believe the instructions on the thread above are fantastic and to my knowledge they work like a charm, but something did not go well with nLite, so I wasn’t able to complete them. In the past, I have tried some of the tips mentioned in there though and they really make a difference, but still nothing compared to my experience with suse.
The fact that I failed tweaking XP (or sabotaged my self sub-consciously) meant only one thing: Back to Linux! But should I move back to suse, or maybe try something new. While searching for a linux distro that works well with netbooks, I stumbled on Easy Peasy. The scree-shots were nice, it is based on Ubuntu (ie user friendly). So off with the installation!
The OS installation was easier than easy, you only have to follow the instructions given here. One word of advise though: Use an MD5 checker with your download! It will save you a lot of frustration later . I had to download the iso 3 times to finally get it right but it worked like a charm in the end. Almost like a charm…
The very first thing I tried to do was to set up a vpn connection and – what a surprise – I couldn’t. From what I understood, reading countless web sites, was that pptp is not directly supported in linux, and it’s usually used only for windows vpns. I found some great instructions here, but they are great for everybody else, except me, since I could not install network-manager-pptp. For some reason that I cannot understand, the specific package was not available in any of the repositories that were configured in Easy Peasy. There is however an application, similar to Windows “Add Remove Programs” and when I tried that one, it found a pptp client and let me install it. Be sure to select “All Open Source Applications” from the drop down list!
Now, I need to do some extensive testing, but so far I love it.
I break my silence to tell you all about a nice little program I’ve been using lately. I used to work with a single PC but now I constanly use two machines and I need to move files back and forth. Now don’t get me wrong but despite all the wrong things about Windows, I would rarely use something else to do standard things. See, I want to keep my machines with as few extra stuff as possible. Over the years, I had read about different file handling proggies, including those who would replace windows copy.
Up to now, I hadn’t have any reason not to use what my OS provided, but since network traffic is involved, I started to look for an alternative. And I found one. It’s called TerraCopy and it guarantees to make your transfers faster and more comfortable.
But, I am sure, you don’t want me to reproduce what’s already on their website right? You want to hear my testimony. The best feature for me, is that when you want to copy a number of files and one of them is corrupt, TerraCopy will continue with the rest of them, without breaking the whole transfer. If you’ve ever tried to copy files from a CD only to get frustrated because one of those files could not be copied, then you know you will love TerraCopy. Speed is also something I took into consideration although I have no presise numbers to share with you. What I can tell you though, is that when I used windows copy to move a large number of files, the process would become slower and slower and the only thing I could do , was to break the transfer in batches. Now I don’t have to do this, TerraCopy is very reliable.
It is free for personal use and although the pro version did not offer that many more features, I would consider a pro licence for company use.
As of today, smoking is prohibited in all close space public places in Greece*. That includes work space, public transportation, public service buildings, etc. There’s a lot of talk going on about the law, whether it is too strict or too elastic, there’s speculation that it will fail, there’s theories that the “politicians do not care about our health, but are only interested to collect money from fines”.
I am a smoker. I am a heavy smoker (2 packs a day, you can’t call that casual smoking).
I have absolutely no problem with not smoking where I cannot smoke. I respect those who don’t smoke, I understand that they are not obliged by anyone or anything to inhale my smoke, but as they claim they have rights, so have I.
I have the right to be protected from all you stupid non smokers who think it’s funny to laugh at my face just because someone thought to pass a law for something that derives out of pure logic!
Till now, I have been pestered by numerous people who claimed victory over smoking, who wished they would force me to quit smoking, who made jokes at me…
All of you, FUCK OFF. You will die of cancer anyway…
*It is the third or fourth time someone passes a law like that, but every time they “make a fresh start”.
I use Firefox. Let me say that again. I USE FIREFOX!
However, there are people who still use IE, either because they don’t know of any other browsers* or because they like it. It’s not my job to convence them otherwise. So, when somebody asks me to help them update their laptop, I will not change any of their programs, including browsers.
So, to set True Story Mode on, I was given an ACER laptop and I was told to check it a bit, see if there’s anything wrong with it, you know, the usual process. One of the things I generally tend to do, is updating the machines people give me for two reasons: a) There are some critical updates that will make a windows box a bit safer and more stable and b) because someone who has paid for an OS should enjoy all the services provided by the developer (sic). When it asked me to install IE8, I did what I had to do: I asked the owner…
Yes, of cource I want that! A collegue installed it and said it is fantastic!
Whatever… I’ve had problems of my own with IE8, but it was on a Vista Buisness machine, this laptop was with XP, so I did what I was told. Well, some time later, the laptop was updated, the owner had the brand new browser that was supposed to be fantastic and I was done.
Well… almost done… One of the firtst things the owner did when I gave the laptop back, was visiting mySpace, to check out some hot new band or something. In order to view the mySpace music player, you have to upgrade your flash player. No problem, it’s been done many times, piece of cake, right?
Wrong! The standard procedure, to install flash player 10 from within IE, will not work. At least it did not work in my case, to the point that IE froze and I could only kill the process through Task Manager. A little bit of Google search shows that many more have the same problem. To tell you the truth, I did not bother to look for a tried solution, to see what others did, I did what seemed to me more logical:
I downloaded the stand alone installer from Adobe’s site. I closed IE, run the installer and presto. Flash player was updated to version 10.
Not sure what the problem is. I really don’t care, I just wanted to get my job done and frankly why should anyone care? The average user will only follow instructions provided by the developers (in this case Adobe) and when he sees his browser freezing, will not know what to do.
So, let me say this once more: I USE FIREFOX!
PS: This is not a FF vs IE post. I know that FF has problems too, I know there are other browsers as well, I know that IE will be patched sometime soon. I just don’t like being called again because someone cannot update their flash player…
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